"To be hybrid anticipates the future. This is America, the nation of all nationalities. The racial and cultural intermixture is the antithesis of all the tenet of the Axis Powers. For us to fall into the Fascist line of race bigotry is to defeat our unique personality and strength." Isamu Noguchi, "I Become a Nisei", 1942
US President Donald Trump's travel ban (suspended after a federal district judge issued a temporary restraining order against it, but soon to be rescinded and replaced with a new one) turned immigration and refugee policies into a global hot button issue. These themes are usually analysed from a political or social point of view, but the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, NY (32-37 Vernon Boulevard) is currently exploring them with a compact exhibition that will hopefully prompt visitors to think more about nationality, segregation and deportation.
Curated by Noguchi Museum Senior Curator Dakin Hart, "Self-Interned, 1942: Noguchi in Poston War Relocation Center" (through January 2018), marks the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066. Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 February 1942, this directive authorized the internment of Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese heritage living on the west coast. Artist Isamu Noguchi voluntarily entered the Poston War Relocation Center, in the Arizona Desert, despite being exempt from internment as a resident of New York.
Noguchi, who was also chairman of The Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy and a national spokesperson for the Japanese-American community, took this decision to give something positive to the forcibly displaced community of Japanese Americans. He hoped, indeed, that it would have been possible for him to turn the camp into a more human environment, adding a park and recreational area, baseball fields, swimming pools, and a design for a cemetery.
Instead, he was never supported by the Poston officials, the War Relocation Authority, or the War Department, his plans were never put into practice and he managed to get out of the camp seven months later.
During his time at the camp Noguchi walked the desert, wrote letters to friends and focused on his work.
Taken from the museum collection, the pieces on display for this exhibition follow a chronological timeline to trace Noguchi's creative path before, during, and after his time at Poston (so from 1941 to 1944, the year after he returned to New York City).
While at the camp Noguchi's works transformed, going from figurative to modernist: a sculpture portraying theatre actress Lily Zietz (1941) shows the time when the artist was supporting himself creating portrait heads of the rich and famous (before entering Poston Noguchi was working on Ginger Rogers' portrait).
At Poston, the artist started working with new materials, including wood, while he tried to tackle satire ("Yellow Landscape", 1943, is a reference to the anti-Asian stereotype sweeping the Unites States after December 7, 1941) and consolatory subjects ("Mother and Child", 1944-47).
The event also includes archival documents such as his essay "I Become a Nisei" (the term indicated first generation Japanese-Americans) and letters like the one Nogouchi's wrote to Man Ray in May 1942 in which he calls life in the camp as "the weirdest, most unreal situation".
The exhibition concludes with abstract pieces like "Double Red Mountain", a table sculpture in Persian travertine that represents microcosmic landscapes, and "Gateways", comprising the artist's signature voids, doorways, and donut-shaped suns.
The main point of this event is not just looking at the impact his experience at Poston had on Noguchi's art, but also exploring a gap in American democracy, this is what makes "Self-Interned" a very relevant exhibition for our times.
"We who are artists know that any culture worthy of the name blossoms with the growth of the indivisual and dies under Fascism. Let it be said then that the democracies fight for the equality of races and opportunity and the freedom of culture everywhere," Noguchi wrote in his essay "I Become a Nisei". It sounds almost incredible, but, seventy-five years later, they still sound like the most powerful way to oppose to shallow narrow-minded leaders à la Donald Trump.
Image credits for this post
2. Isamu Noguchi. Lily Zietz, 1941. Plaster. ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/ARS. Photograph by Kevin Noble.
3. Isamu Noguchi. Yellow Landscape, 1943. Magnesite, wood, string, metal fishing weight. ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/ARS. Photograph by Kevin Noble.
4. Isamu Noguchi. Double Red Mountain, 1969. Persian red travertine on Japanese pine. ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/ARS. Photograph by Kevin Noble.
5. Isamu Noguchi. Untitled, 1943. Wood, string. ©The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/ARS. Photograph by Kevin Noble.
Comments